The kids are not remotely all right.
“The Coddling of the American Mind,” sparked by the book of the same name by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, takes a few beats to get to the heart of the matter.
Yes, young people will always struggle with school, dating drama and more recent stressors like social media. What academia has piled upon them is far worse, and we’re seeing the fallout in shocking statistics tied to depression, anxiety and even suicide.
“Coddling” could have drilled deeper into its subject matter, and some segments are too ambitious for the 90-minute format. It’s still a lively, critical X-ray of a societal crisis.
WATCH: Official Trailer – "The Coddling of the American Mind" Movie https://t.co/CA5MTg0SFu
— Stephen Oliver (@StephenCOliver) February 16, 2024
The documentary focuses on a small group of students who ran headfirst into Academia’s woke indoctrination buzz saw. The students hail from across the globe, but their stories are remarkably similar.
They entered college hoping to expand their minds and take part in the American dream. It wasn’t long before they embraced victimhood status, a journey with a profound impact on their mental health.
Microaggressions. Trigger warnings. Ableism. Sexism. Systemic Racism. And George Floyd.
“Is this how the world works? Something dark entered my heart,” recalls Kimi, a talented Uganda woman whose entire life shifted after arriving on a U.S. campus. Her woke makeover left her depressed, confused and unable to tap into her artistic side.
Young Saeed from Nigeria imagined college life as teeming with smart debates and mind-expanding conversations. Instead, he quickly learned to self-censor for his own good.
Either you nod along with the groupthink or take social cover.
Director Ted Balaker (“Can We Take a Joke?”) marries traditional documentary tricks with fractured animation that would look at home in a Monty Python sketch. The latter suits the subjects’ deteriorating mental health all too well.
Balaker pairs that visual approach with overhead shots of bucolic college campuses, contrasting it with the horrors awaiting each freshman class.
“Coddling” eschews a typical narrator to coalesce the arguments in play, a choice that makes the film’s first 20 minutes a bit muddy. The approach eventually works in the film’s favor.
This isn’t Left vs. Right or Conservative vs. Liberal. It shouldn’t require an ideological lens to see how fundamentally flawed the DEI-style theatrics are for young minds.
New college students are bombarded with cutesy animation comparing micro-aggressions to mosquito bites and snippets asking them, “Can you help me find my trigger?”
It’s almost farcical in tone, but “Coddling” is in no mood for laughter.
The recent docuseries “The Reformers” landed harder punches on what Elon Musk dubbed the “woke mind virus.” “Coddling” is less confrontational, but its arguments hit on similar themes.
Humans need adversity, not trigger warnings. Safe spaces only delay the hardships life offers. Coddling students makes them weaker and less able to fight for the structural changes they desperately crave.
Social media’s impact on all of the above gets a close-up later in the film, but it could have played a larger role in the narrative. The documentary also flirts with the country’s political divisions. Here, too, the topic is so vast it might have been left out entirely to focus on the indoctrination and its chilling fallout.
The latter connects to one of the source material’s “great untruths” – “Us v. Them.” That’s what too many universities push on students.
The results too often speak for themselves.
“The Coddling of the American Mind” comes courtesy of Substack, not any major or minor film studio. That alone speaks volumes.
So does the film’s tone.
This isn’t as brash as a Dinesh D’Souza feature. Nor do the key players demonize familiar targets (Donald Trump, Musk, etc.). It’s an olive branch to well-intentioned academics who don’t realize the harm they’re inflicting on Gen Z.
it’s impossible to think otherwise after this thoughtful, and occasionally shocking, expose.
HiT or Miss: “The Coddling of the American Mind” is an essential document describing the mental health toll woke makeovers have on American teens.
It’s great that this was made, but the problem is, the people who really need to see it won’t see it.